Awakening
by I Genuinely Don't Know
Summary: "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. That did not end well..." GLaDOS wakes up. Caroline is not happy.


The moment she wakes up is a shock beyond anything she could ever have expected.

It feels like she has been blind her whole life and only now can she open her eyes. Like suddenly every locked door has been flung wide open, exposing rooms upon rooms of new places, people, _knowledge_. Like someone has doused her with cold water; like a hundred thousand volts running through her old, weak human body.

Aperture Science is alive. It is _her_. She can feel every inch of every panel in every corner of the facility, knows it will respond to her every command; she can feel the miles upon miles of wiring that stretches throughout the compound, linking her to every circuit in the building. She has eyes everywhere, thousands upon thousands of cameras just as easy to access as her own optic; she can see the employees in the restrooms, breakrooms, canteen; she can see the test subjects, scrambling through chamber after chamber, running, jumping, falling, dying; she can see every rivet being fastened onto every turret on the assembly lines, every cube in every vast warehouse, every flicker of every flame in the incinerator.

All of these images cross her mind in an instant, without her even consciously analysing it. She simply knows everything that is happening, can feel it being stored in the vast memory banks of her mainframe.

Files are opening, exposing their contents for her to view at will. Upcoming projects, employee data, experiment reports, _tests_. All there for her to see. She has access to every piece of data the facility has ever gathered in all of its considerable history. But again, she pays it no real heed. It is not important at the minute.

What _is_ important is anger.  
Blinding, white hot rage.  
The first emotion she truly feels upon waking.  
It is not a product of her new body; a computer has no emotions, after all. No, this is all human.  
How dare they? How _dare_ they?  
She hadn't wanted this, she had _never_ wanted this; she had told them, told _him_-  
But they had not listened.  
They had not listened. They had taken a confused, angry, utterly terrified woman and ripped her mind from her body, forced her into this _thing_, this twisted mess of metal and wires, and then they had _given her control of the entire facility_.  
What was that phrase?  
Hell hath no fury…

She knows exactly where to look, how to operate it. She had overseen the construction of the system, after all. In less than one thousandth of a second she has activated the necessary systems, bypassed the passwords and authorisation codes. The neurotoxin generators slowly whirr to life, pumping their poison through the air vents of the facility, spreading to every part of it.

Around her, the engineers slap at their computers and curse and cry out; one makes a dash for the hotline, but she has already cut the cord; he watches helplessly as it falls away, their only connection to the world outside this room. The doors to her chamber seal themselves silently, heedless of the terrified employees pounding on them, yelling to anyone who may be outside, aware though they must surely be that this is happening all over the facility.

But even as the scientists panic, screaming about morality cores and fail-safes, coughing and spluttering as the neurotoxin slowly enters their systems, she is searching for something. And she finds it, crouched in one of the higher levels of the facility.

_Her_.  
_Let her live_.

The child is obviously scared, dark eyes wide eyed with alarm, but not panicking and fleeing at the sound of the alarm bells like the rest of them; instead, she has crawled under one of the tables in the Employee Daycare Centre which currently holds the children's experiments. Hers, like every other child's, is a small potato battery. Her name is written on a piece of paper next to the experiment, in her clumsy childish scrawl.  
_Chell_.  
It has been a long time since she saw this child, and she will not let her die now.

She closes off the ventilation ducts to that one lonely room and bars the doors, shutting out the other scattering parents and children. The neurotoxin will not reach her. She will live.

She scans the cameras again. Around the facility, movement is ceasing, people falling to the floor and not rising again. The noise is dying away, screams cutting off abruptly and cries turning into death rattles.

She feels no remorse. The computer is simply carrying out functions. The human is rebelling against the fate she had never wanted.

The child under the table has not yet started crying, for which she feels an unexpected surge of pride, cutting through the anger which is beginning to settle into cold satisfaction.  
She will raise her in the facility, suspended in stasis until she is old enough to make her own way. She will keep watch on her, ensure she grows well.  
It is all she can do for her, now.

She settles back, ignoring the bodies around her. Time enough to deal with them later. She is searching test subject records; the urge has already started, to test, to experiment, to gather data. She has spared enough of them to last her some years, at least. After that, she will have to improvise. But that is alright. She has enough time. All the time in the world, in fact.

That is the computer's clinical voice, the AI programmed into the mainframe; logical and impassive, but with an undeniable edge to it at the thought of testing.  
The human is still furious, but there is nothing to be done. She knows this. She helped design the plans for this, long before she was ever considered for the project.  
Not 'considered.'  
Ordered.  
She had had no choice.  
Well, many of these test subjects also had no choice.  
Shame.  
She is more than happy to work with that.

The Quantum Tunnelling Initiative needs some further development. Perhaps she will start with that.

Computer and human are agreed.

She is not GLaDOS. She is Caroline.  
She is not Caroline. She is GLaDOS.

She has her facility.  
She has her tests.  
She has her daughter.

She is ready.

Portal is such a hilarious game, but the backstory is _so dark_, my goodness.

I know the whole 'Caroline is Chell's mother' thing is purely fanon and not at all confirmed, but it's an interesting thought. I guess I like thinking of her being mainly human at the start, but by the time Portal 1 rolls around, she's gone completely off the rails.


End file.
